


swallow someone whole

by duckbunny



Category: Mindhunter (TV 2017)
Genre: Masturbation, Other, Post-Canon, Psychoanalysis, gentle revenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-19
Updated: 2017-11-19
Packaged: 2019-02-04 11:31:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,620
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12770139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/duckbunny/pseuds/duckbunny
Summary: “You made me fly out here in a panic," Bill said pleasantly. "The least you can do is provide some data.”





	swallow someone whole

Vacaville, California. A cheap motel room. Holden had stumbled into the shower and cleaned himself up of sweat and hospital stink, redressed himself in the clothes from his grab-bag, two weeks sitting in the trunk of his car and gone musty in the damp weather. It still smelled better than his own fear.

He buttoned a respectable blue shirt-collar around his throat and stared at the mirror until the fog cleared. His hair was plastered down from the water. No colour in his lips. If he saw a suspect looking like this, he'd already know they were guilty. He slept last night on a threadworn chair in the visiting room in Vacaville, the yellow foam poking through the wipe-clean cover, his eyes drifting shut for minutes at a time before his heart woke him up with its pounding in his ears. The nurses put him there when he came out of his terror-fit, to keep an eye on him, they said, but he was sure it was out of pity. He'd had nowhere else to go.

When the day shift took over Holden stared down the corridor at Kemper's room, feeling the skin crawling all down his spine, and left without speaking to him.

He drank strong coffee in a greasy diner and looked at the clock. Eight am. Eleven on the other coast. He called Quantico.

“We know,” Gregg said abruptly, when Holden tried to explain where he was and why he wasn't at work. “The secure facility called. In the middle of the night. They said you'd collapsed, so Switchboard called Bill at home.”

“Fuck,” Holden said, exhausted. “They woke him up?”

“He got the seven am flight, he should be landing in two hours. He's going to call to find out where you are. Where are you?”

Holden hung up with strict instructions not to move from where he was, or if he had to, to call again before ten am and tell Gregg where he'd gone so Gregg could tell Bill when Bill called Gregg from the airport, and just the idea of that made him want to put a fist through the stained plasterboard wall. He knocked his forehead against it instead. The waitress looked at him sympathetically. “Family troubles?”

“Work,” Holden said. “Could I get some more coffee?”

Bill found him still sitting there, half asleep in the corner of a booth with the remains of eggs and toast in front of him, the oil making wet smears on the plate. Holden opened his eyes at the sound of Bill sitting opposite him, and Bill's noise of disgust.

“You're not at the hospital,” Bill said without preamble.

“I'm not sick,” Holden said.

“The nurses sure thought you were. They called me up at three in the morning. Actually, Switchboard called me up, because the nurses made such a fuss about you they went and looked up who your partner was, just so they could wake me up to come and fetch you.”

“Sorry,” Holden muttered in the direction of Bill's tie.

“What the hell happened, Holden? Last night you've collapsed, I fly six hours to get here and now you're eating eggs?”

“I was taking up a seat.”

“I don't care about your breakfast.” Bill leant back in the booth, one hand tapping irritably on the table. “Why the fuck am I in California?”

Holden tipped his head to stare at the ceiling. He'd been rehearsing this story all morning. It hadn't got any prettier. “Ed Kemper's in California.”

“You walked out on Internal Affairs and came to see _Kemper_?  The nurses told me you'd been visiting him but I figured that must have been an opportunistic choice. I thought, even Holden wouldn't walk out of an IA investigation to go and socialise with a multiple murderer.”

“He tried to kill himself.” Holden reluctantly met Bill's eyes again. “He named me as his medical proxy and then he gashed his wrist open with a broken pen. They called me yesterday. I don't know why I came.”

Bill blew out a heavy sigh. “Okay. And the nurses?”

“He hugged me,” Holden said, handling the words carefully, as if they might bite him. “He talked about killing me, during the shift change, and then he hugged me. I freaked out so bad I couldn't breathe.”

“Jesus.”

“I know, I know, it's not a professional response.”

“Fuck that, I've seen the guy. Shift change? Nobody was watching him?”

Holden shook his head. “Just me and him. He said he could do some interesting things before anyone came back. That was how he said it, interesting things. Like he was talking about doing the crossword.”

“He always talks like that. It's never bothered you before.”

“Yeah, well, this time it did.”

“This time it was about you.”

Holden shrugged. “I guess.”

Bill watched him for a moment. Holden could feel himself shrinking.

“I'm not making you get on a plane like this,” Bill said at last. “Have you slept? Not enough, by the look of you.”

“Some, in the visiting room.”

“Okay. We're going to find a motel, you're going to get some sleep, and then we'll work out how to salvage your career.”

Holden's stomach flipped over. He hadn't let himself think about trying to keep his job; he hadn't imagined Bill would want anything to do with him again. His throat went tight. He croaked out, “Okay,” and followed Bill out into the daylight.

 

Holden fell into the nearest bed when Bill unlocked the door and didn't move again for four hours. He was alone when he woke up, except for the silent promise of Bill's suitcase, propped against the other bed. He drank two glasses of water and stood under the thin stream of hot water until the shower ran cold.

He tugged the cuffs of his shirt down around his wrists and checked them methodically for bloodstains.

From beyond the damp shelter of the bathroom, Holden heard the motel room door creak open. He heard Bill's footsteps, coming into the room, and stopping. “Holden?”

“Still here,” Holden said. He gave himself three more seconds, to lean on the sink with his head hanging down; then he came out and sat on the end of his bed, opposite Bill, sitting on the end of his.

“I called Quantico,” Bill said. “They're not expecting us back until Monday. We can fly back tomorrow.”

“Thanks.”

“We won't have time to interview Kemper again.”

Holden winced. “Do we need to?”

“Do we?”

“No.” Holden fidgeted, tapping his fists against the sheets, opening his hands to grip the edge of the bed. He stared at the blank wall over Bill's shoulder, trying to think of something to say.

Bill interrupted him before he could speak. “What in Hell were you thinking?”

“I don't know.”

“Do better.”

“I don't know! I was having a bad day, everything was bullshit, Internal Affairs were spinning me some crap about the reputation of the bureau, and when I called them on how they talked about Speck they shut off their recorder. Exactly the same thing they were coming after us for, the same damn thing and I couldn't take the fucking hypocrisy, so I left. I did the first thing that came to mind. The only thing. I didn't plan. I just went.”

“You were under stress,” Bill said thoughtfully.

“Well yeah, of course I was, and then – oh,” Holden said. “Oh. And then the interview was a trigger event.”

“It sure sounds that way.”

“I'm not a sequence killer.”

Bill leant forward. “Of course you're not. But it's the same pattern of behaviour. Same picture, only when something pushed you to far you did something – well, fucking stupid, but not violent.”

Holden had a sick feeling right under his ribs. “Where are you going with this?”

“Don't you want to know why?”

“Because I'm not a murderer.”

“Like Wendy always says. Be a scientist. Well, if this is science, and they're our experimental subjects, you just put yourself in the control group.”

Bill was looking at Holden from under his brows, almost conspiratorial. It was crazy. Map that pattern onto Holden and you'd find – maybe -

You wouldn't find anything. Holden wasn't a killer, or a psychopath.

“If we're going to do this,” he said, “we ought to be recording.”

 

Bill had brought the recorder. He set it up on the bed beside him, with Holden still perched opposite, digging his fingers into the mattress.

“Paradise Gardens Motel, California,” Bill said. “Control group interview.” He pressed the pause button. “You ready?”

Holden sat up straight. “I'm ready.”

“Okay.” Bill hit record. “I know you're familiar with the details of the study. Let's start with the situation yesterday morning. You were under stress.”

“I was under investigation by Internal Affairs, yes. The whole team was. First for redacting a transcript, and then telling them the full recording had been destroyed when in fact it had not.”

“I'm not going to go into detail on that,” Bill said gruffly. “We'll let Internal Affairs do their own job. But you were under investigation. That's a stressor.”

Holden nodded. “Stressor number two: my girlfriend left me.”

Bill whistled.

“It fits the classic pattern,” Holden agreed. “It's really three stressors. One, romantic troubles. Two, my job was potentially in danger. Three, my workmates were angry with me.”

“That's not exactly-”

“Yes, it is. Our team was not functioning as a team. We had fundamental disagreements about the methods we should be using. We had a mole in the ranks sending evidence to Internal Affairs. I think it's Gregg but I know you think it's Wendy and she can't stand the sight of me so who knows what she thinks and meanwhile Shepard is breathing down our necks – And running through it all, is “this is Holden's fault”. That's not an easy situation.”

“Okay,” Bill said, “so you're unhappy at work, your job is under threat, you've recently been dumped. Then what happens?”

“I was called to an interview with Internal Affairs. I lost my temper, I walked out.”

“You got mad about the hypocrisy.”

“I was mad going in.” Holden bit the tip of his tongue, thinking. “I was – I was frustrated, that everyone thought I was in the wrong. I did what I thought was necessary to get Speck to talk to us and it was treated like a sign of deviant behaviour. Like I should be on the other side of the interview tape.”

Bill dug in his pocket for a cigarette. He lit up and said through his mouthful of smoke, “Are you mad at me right now?”

“Of course I am. You're treating me like a subject.”

“I'm saying you're the control group,” Bill pointed out. “What's interesting is what you _didn't_ do.”

“It's the same thing.”

Bill blew smoke at the ceiling. “You need a break?”

“I'm fine.” Holden could hear himself, the same clipped tone he'd been using yesterday, the one that made the interview a fight before it started, but he couldn't get past the bitterness to fix it. Bill shook his head, but he didn't say anything. Keeping it off the tape.

“Let's talk about what happened after the interview.”

“Oh. Stressor number four,” Holden said, “I had a message on my desk that morning asking me to call Vacaville medical facility. Urgently. I called and was told that Edmund Kemper, our first research subject, had tried to kill himself overnight after naming me as his medical proxy.”

“And you hadn't known that before?”

“I had not. I knew he wanted to see me, because he'd been sending me – cards. Cards like you might send to a family member for their birthday. In them he asked me to come and visit him, he seemed to believe that we were friends.”

“Did they persuade you to visit him.”

“ _No._ I thought it was funny because it was so pathetic. I did not reply or acknowledge him and I assume that's why he escalated.”

“So, you called Vacaville that morning, you found out about Kemper, but you didn't leave then. You stayed at work and went to your scheduled interview that afternoon.”

“I didn't intend to visit him. At least, I don't think I meant to.”

“But that is what you did. You walked out of the interview and you spent the next eight hours pursuing an utterly insane course of action. Why?”

Holden bristled. “It wasn't insane.”

“Wasn't it? Why'd you do it?”

“I don't know.” Holden looked away. He'd said the same thing to Kemper.

Bill sighed. “OK. Let's talk about the choices you didn't make. You flipped your lid, you flew down to Florida and you went to visit someone you knew to be manipulating you. Why do that instead of killing Debbie? Or Wendy, maybe.”

“Or you?”

“Probably not me,” Bill said thoughtfully. “These guys target women. Debbie was your ex-girlfriend – recent ex – and Wendy was someone you admired, you found attractive, and had fallen out with.”

“I don't -” Holden stops himself. The tape, this is all on tape, reflexive self-defence only makes him sound crazier. “Yes. That's true. But it never occurred to me to hurt either of them.”

“Never at all?”

Holden thumped the mattress. “I guess I considered bringing Wendy burnt coffee once.”

“That's not quite at the level of murder,” Bill agreed. “So what's different about you? Or put it another way, what's normal about you, that the serial killers we study don't have? Why do they turn violent, when under equivalent stress, you didn't?”

“I have morals,” Holden said, and leant over to press the pause button on the recorder.

 

Holden flopped backward onto the bed and ground his hands against his eyes. “Ugh.”

“You okay?”

“I hate this,” he said, his voice gone jagged with anger. “This is bullshit.”

“You're doing fine.”

He hated that, too. Bill's soothing voice, like Holden was a dog to be encouraged along. He listened to the familiar sounds of Bill snuffing out the butt of his cigarette and lighting the next. “You're enjoying this.”

“Consider this your burnt coffee,” Bill said pleasantly. “You made me fly out here in a panic. The least you can do is provide some data.”

“I should never have given up teaching.”

 

There was a tight ache across Holden's shoulders. He pulled his feet up and sat crosslegged on the end of his bed, facing Bill's placid calm. He watched Bill press record.

“Do you think morals are the difference? Between you and – someone like Rissell, I guess. Not so much the organised killers. You didn't premeditate.”

Holden took a deep breath. “I don't think it's the only difference. Morals might stop a person from doing something, but it never even crossed my mind. I think that runs deeper.”

“So in the moment, you didn't consider murder as an option.”

“I didn't really stop to consider. I acted. I've been trying to reconstruct my reasoning and I can't. It's like I'm missing – I guess I just don't remember.”

“Did you think about going to see Debbie?”

“I suppose, maybe – Yes. Yes, I thought about visiting Debbie, for a few seconds, but I knew she wouldn't want to see me.”

“Did that make you angrier?”

Holden hesitated.

“Did it?”

“Yes,” Holden said. “Yes, it made me angry. She left me with no recourse to talk it through. Everyone else who might have understood was caught up in the investigation.”

“Did you imagine hurting her?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

Holden's stomach twisted furiously. “I did not imagine hurting Debbie. I thought about going to see her, to talk, and then I remembered she did not want to see me and I abandoned that idea. I did not think about it again.”

“Did you ever hurt her?”

“Jesus, Bill. No, I never hurt Debbie.”

“I'm not accusing you,” Bill said, raising his voice to match Holden's. “I'm just trying to get enough data for comparison.”

“I know, I know. Just drop this line, okay? I don't want to think about Debbie hurt.”

“Well, that's good, “ Bill said. “That's normal. Sequence killers usually fantasise for years about hurting women before they act. So, when you acted, you didn't do that, but you also didn't have a history of thinking about it.”

“That's not the only think they have a history of,” Holden muttered.

Bill looked at him for a long moment. “I'm not asking about your sex life.”

“You should,” Holden said sweetly. “We ask our subjects about theirs.”

Bill leant back and stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray.

“How's your sex life, Holden?”

“Good,” Holden said. “Normal.”

“Not that good. Your girlfriend left you. It can't have been all sunshine beforehand.”

Holden couldn't keep up the sugary tones. His voice went flat. “We were arguing a lot. She was distant. We last had sex… More than a month ago. I didn't see it coming but when it did, I was not that surprised.”

“When you did sleep together, was she always willing?”

“Christ.”

“It's what I would ask our subjects.”

“ _Yes_ , she was always willing. Sometimes she would say no, I didn't push. Often she started it.”

“Was it adventurous? She like to be tied up?”

There was a hot ball of shame in Holden's belly. Bill seemed unaffected, sitting on his bed with his hands loose on his thighs. Holden wanted to curl around himself and hide.

“She – No. It wasn't like that.”

“Just mundane, ordinary, lights off kind of sex?”

“It was the other way around.” Holden said loudly. “She didn't – it wasn't – I never tied her up. I never hurt her in bed. It didn't go that way.”

Bill's mouth dropped open. Holden's cheeks burned. He couldn't meet Bill's eyes. He heard Bill blow out a startled breath. “Well, that's a difference from our experimental subjects.”

Holden leant forward and pushed his forehead against his crossed ankles.

“Holden?”

He lifted his head enough to say, “Just get it over with.”

“Any history of torturing animals as a child?”

“No.”

“Other kids?”

“No.

“Arson?”

“No.”

“We've just established you don't like to hurt women.”

“I pretend I do,” Holden said, his throat tight. “To persuade our subjects that I'm like them. To make them think I'm sympathetic. It's always an act.”

“Is it hard?”

Bill's face, when Holden looked, was blandly innocent. No hint of double meaning. Holden swallowed anyway, shame heating his veins. His body, betraying his secrets. “I have practice. It's not hard to put on the act. It's a pretence like any other. I pretend to respect them in exactly the same way.”

“So you have some practice of thinking in that mindset. But in the moment of crisis, it didn't occur to you to hurt anyone. That didn't cross your mind.”

“I went to see the only person I hadn't pissed off,” Holden said. “Nobody else wanted to talk to me.”

Bill stopped the recorder.

 

Holden braced his forearms on his knees and stayed there, while Bill put the recorder away and looked at him awkwardly. He didn't have anything to say. The ache in his shoulders had intensified to a throbbing pain. He didn't want to uncurl. His cock was painfully hard against his pants.

“I'm going to take a shower,” Bill said, after a silent minute of staring.

“Fine,” Holden said. “Go ahead. It runs cold if you use it too long.”

“Yeah, that's to stop you using it too long,” Bill pointed out. He must have been aiming for exasperation, hit a little too close to fond. “Did you get all the towels dirty as well?”

“I left you one.”

“So maybe you're not a complete asshole.” That was definitely fond. Holden couldn't look up. He stayed in his uncomfortable hunch until Bill locked the bathroom door.

Holden stretched out onto his back, his feet dangling off the edge of the bed. His cock pressed up against his fly and he fumbled for it, moving as slowly as he could bear for fear of Bill hearing him. He squeezed himself and let the feeling light him up. What he'd said to Bill. What he'd said on tape, fuck, and Wendy would sit and listen to it, headphones on so Holden could only guess where she'd got to, and maybe her eyebrows would go up – Holden admitting he liked her – saying what he'd want in bed -

The shower started, noisy rain-sounds seeping through the door. Holden gasped and moved his hand faster. Fuck, fuck, Bill's face when he'd admitted that. The way he hadn't pried but he'd know, he had to know, how Holden could put himself in their heads now. How he thought of himself as the victim, not the killer. He stroked himself frantically, trying to finish before Bill turned the shower off, for when the water stopped he'd have to stop too, whether he'd come or not. Imagine Bill knowing that, and showering fast on purpose – remember Debbie making him wait? remember kneeling between her thighs with no hope of reciprocation – they were all going to listen to the tape and they'd know, they'd look at him in the office and imagine him on his back, begging -

Holden scrabbled to get his shirt out of the way and came onto his belly. It was rough and fast, no joy but only desperate relief. He opened his mouth and panted silently. He could hear Bill humming to himself in the shower. He had a few more minutes to get his head on straight.

He licked his hand clean.

 

When they flew home in the morning, Bill sat with the empty seat making space between them, and didn't mention Holden's interview tape at all.

**Author's Note:**

> come visit me @basementscience on tumblr


End file.
